Back to My Mac not working on Mac OS X Leopard

I am using an Apple PowerBook G4 on the road and I would like to access my Mac computers seamlessly through the .mac technology “Back to My Mac” offered in Mac OS X Leopard. This provides easy access to file services and remote control through window sharing from desktop in Finder. The window sharing is similar to the Window Sharing service offered in iChat and that of Apple Remote Access.

The idea and promise from is no less than wonderful. For me this was a main reason reason to buy Mac OS X Leopard from Apple. From now on you do not have to think of domain names, dynamic domain names, bonjour identities, ip numbers, firewalls, security, passwords or even bother to start the service – it is just there under your fingertips. Or so I thought! Most of the time Back to My Mac works like a charm when on a local network, but as it turns out Back to My Mac only works sometimes on the Internet. If the moon and your lucky star is in conjunction.

I think Apple is very well aware of this fact and is working to solve issues related to Apple technologies. Some issues also involves Apple Remote Desktop. But there are unfortunately also other factors to be considered. There has been a lot of heated discussion about this topic in the the Apple Support Discussion Forums. Recently I have experienced that some of the threads oddly has disappeared from the forums.

Even with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 I experience the following persistent problems:

1) Macs are unable to see each other over the Internet through Back to My Mac.
2) Back to My Mac Window Sharing asks unnecessarily for another password in mid session and will not accept the correct password.
3) Back to My Mac Service seems disappear and appear randomly.
4) Back to My Mac sometimes seem to break or interrupt access with Apple Remote Access.

Ha!
If u need to logout+login .mac account to reset it every once in a while – it’s an outrage!!

at least one of these machines isa remote one!! that’s the whole idea of this feature. Telling users to login+logout is actually telliong them:
“buy a flight ticket. Tell your boss u r taking a vacation and travel to the remote machine to reset its .mac account” – that’s pathetic.

There are many VNC (and other) based technologies to allow full sharing and remote control. They all work great – but requires installation & configuration – not to mention fiddling with your router settings.

The “promise” behind back to my mac was an alternative solution, settings free (u define it just once) – it shouldnt be to difficult to support, btw.

The fact that this service goes “ac / dc” on people is outrageous – especially since a .mac account costs money!!!

I am sitting right now at a cafe’ 5 mins from my home – and can’t pull my “save game” file from the home computer in order to play here on my laptop….